The pic is a tribute to Westlake, my little home, but also to my iPhone 5S, which has this amazing ability to take good pictures in bad light. (please click to enbiggen)

And so the Ole filter makes a pass...

Yay, the Tour started today! Yesterday I was with a friend, and I said "tomorrow the Tour starts", and he said "what Tour?" If you're in that category, so be it.) I will be making separate posts as per usual*, so those of you who would say "what Tour" can safely ignore them...

* where by "usual" I mean up through 2011, since in 2012 and 2013 I was Facebooking instead of blogging

Evolution in Action: "Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense... We conclude that criminality appears to be adaptive in a contemporary industrialized country, and that this association can be explained by antisocial behavior being part of an adaptive alternative reproductive strategy." Yikes. Sounds like Unnatural Selection in action.

Bill Whittle: Firewall: Throwing away victory in Iraq. I must say I agree with quite a lot of this, although not with the implication that Obama and his team don't want to win. I think they honestly don't know how.

Pretty interesting: If I were Ted Cruz. I was fairly anti-Cruz after the government shutdown, and I still don't think that was a reasonable political tactic even though I don't think Obamacare was a good idea or well implemented. But I recently read The Rise of Ted Cruz in the New Yorker - I'm pretty sure it was not supposed to be flattering - which put him in a different light. Just wish he didn't have that Christian-religious-sanctimony.

This is just beautiful ... visualizing algorithms. Amazing how much animation brings understanding of an algorithm. There was a lot of work in creating these examples, but they're worth it :)

Super cool optical illusion. The principle behind this is most interesting. I wonder if it could be used for movies? (e.g., use a 3D screen?)

Seth Godin: Is better possible? "The answer to this is so obvious to me that it took me a while to realize that many people are far more comfortable with 'no'." My answer is 'yes', even if it *isn't* obvious.

The visualization posts illustrate an important principle to consider when reading political posts: point of view matters. If you want to change someone's mind, the fastest way is to help change their point of view.